A television receiver comprising a teletext decoder of the type described in the opening paragraph is known from German Offenlegungsschrift DE 36 22 308 A1. In this teletext decoder the page number of each transmitted teletext page is detected and this page number is stored as a reception indication in the memory medium. The known receiver provides great convenience of use. In fact, if the user requests a teletext page, it is checked whether the page number of the desired page is stored so that the user can be informed whether the desired page is present or not present in the transmitted cycle. If the page number is not stored, the corresponding page is apparently not transmitted and the user will choose another page. If the page number is stored but if the page itself is not immediately available, the user will have to wait for some time until the requested page has been captured and is displayed.
It is to be noted that it will always take some time before all pages have been received once after tuning to another transmitter. The absence of a page number in the memory medium is not a reliable indication of the fact that the relevant page is not present in the transmitted cycle during this period, which will be further referred to as initialization period. Information about this for the user is therefore preferably omitted temporarily. However, the relevant period differs from transmitter to transmitter and a drawback of the known decoder is that the initialization period should be such that it even covers the teletext transmission which is considered to be the slowest. Another drawback of the known teletext decoder is that the user will unjustly wait for reception of a requested page if the corresponding page number is stored in the memory medium but if the relevant page has meanwhile been removed from the teletext program.